If you combine silhouettes with line of action, you can control your poses so that they tell the story well. Every pose should have a direction. Where you aim the body can tell you what the character is doing and what he is feeling. People tend to lean toward or away from things and where the lean helps give meaning to each moment.

Many cartoons today have no line of action or silhoettes. The characters just stand straight up and down. I see this even in a lot of full animation and in a lot of animation students' cartoon drawings.

In this animation, you can see the real value of clear staging using line of action and clear silhouettes. The limbs are kept in the clear.

Here's fake line of action:Samurai Jack has a line of action.The other characters have arched bodies which would make you think you are looking at a line of action, but the arches don't have direction. They don't aim or point anywhere. You need your characters to aim somewhere to have a line of action.

Here are some jumbled undirected poses from expensive modern cartoons to compare approaches.

http://www.disney-dreams.net/gallery.phpI know the animators are totally capable of clear classic principles. I assume that it's the management that thinks if something looks classic, then it's too "cartoony" so they bend the artists towards what they think is more like what imagine live action is.If you are thinking that those don't have line of action or silhouettes on purpose because they are "realistic" then take a gander at this Frazetta painting:

I think old school clear staging whether in cartoons or illustrations is more effective than modern stiff awkward stuff.It's hard to stage a fat guy, but this drawing shows a lot of skill and thought. The line of action is clear even though the silhouette is not.

If you wanna see tons of old classic cartoons that you can't see anywhere else, you gotta visit Asifa's amazing animation archive. If you are in LA, be sure to drop in and experience cartoon heaven!

30 comments:

I love that Terrytoons cartoon! That skinny guy has such a cool design- kind of reminds me of Chuck Jones for some reason. I remember the cartoon also having a painting of an old couple with all the vermin running around them; and then to signify that they died the painting fades away. Ha!!!

thanx john,with a right line of action i did found a lot of change in my drawing.i compared it with my old drawings and there is hell lot of diffrence.thanx really cant stop reading ur blog.i now think i dont need to spend money on useless animation institute i go.

You're trying to prove that the "expensive modern cartoons" hardly (if ever) have good line of action, by giving screengrabs of a completely frontal view where the character bends towards the camera and a pretty much throwaway sequence of a movie full of great LOA examples?

I'm a student at AnimationMentor.com, where we get taught by the people working on these expensive modern cartoons, and pretty much the first thing we learn is Line of Action. True, it isn't *always* used, or used well, but most of the time it is.

I've just recently discovered your blog, even though I've always been a big fan of your work. So much knowledge accumulated in these posts, keeps me amazed. As a 2D animator it's truly inspiring to find lessons so incredibly clear and well illustrated as yours. Can't thank you enough, best wishes from Brazil.

I scoured tons of frame grabs from those movies and there is a lot less of every classic animation principle than older cartoons.

I picked obvious frames to contrast against the old drawings on purpose.

I'm sure you're right about the animators being capable of doing it. It's probably the executives who lean everyone towards what they think is more "realistic" which makes it harder to do what animators instinctively do.

Aw come on John!! You keep using the exact same Samurai Jack/FOP framegrabs as bad examples to support your arguments. There's good examples to be found. Do the research, instead of using the first bad google images you find.

Besides...if one were to be look through Ren and Stimpy with a fine tooth comb, I'm pretty sure there'd be tons of bad examples that could be posted as well.

Although i very much agree with your point, disneys Tarzan (and not the second garbage one) has amazing animation in it, and if you screen cap the scene of Tarzan surfing thought the trees then youll see how obvious and amazing it is, samurai jack on the other hand is a much more stylized approach and compared to fairly odd parents, its genius.

the blog you have going is great, i am looking, taking notes and will apply them to my own blog.....a perfect example of the bad design you speak of orginates here in vancouver.....using flash as excuse for bad design....draw bad cause flash can't handle it is something i have heard many times.

>>I love that Terrytoons cartoon! That skinny guy has such a cool design- kind of reminds me of Chuck Jones for some reason.

Kali, Perhaps it's because of it's similarity to Dan Backslide from the Jones cartoon "The Dover Boys", which was created a few years before the Terrytoon cartoon. Both cartoons are parodies of 19th century melodramas, with thin, overly histrionic villians.

anyone else good besides frazetta? i'm out of the illustration loop anymore.

I just did a Post On N. C. Wyeth at the ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive. Wyeth has been unfairly criticized for his "melodramatic posing", when in truth he is actually just applying all the principles John's talking about to make his images strong and read clearly.

I've drawn comics where I've been dissatisfied with the actual poses, which looked stiff and awkward. Then I thought, WWJKD? When I redrew the pose by placing a solid line of action first, the pose "worked" (well, as much as my current skill level permits it to work).

LOA is so incredibly vitally important that one wonders how animators go without it. Probably the extensive use of computarmachienes to make things shiny doesn't help; my father, an engineer and draftsman, reports that back in the old days you always started a drawing for a part with your center lines, and these days with AutoCAD doing all the work no one knows how to do center lines.

"I scoured tons of frame grabs from those movies and there is a lot less of every classic animation principle than older cartoons."

Definitly can't argue with that. I don't think it's really a conscious executive thing though. Most feature productions tend to lean towards realism more than in the past, and I think many animators just forget to consider how useful a tool it can be, as opposed to not putting it in because "that's more realistic". Often it's clear (when I actually know the animators of certain shots), that the supervising animators in the Disney 2d features have more experience and put LOA and other principles to use more than the other animators and assistants. And I highly doubt that type of executives would even recognize LOA... even if it weren't realistic, I bet it'd just fool them if done right.

I just went thru 10 pages of those Hunchback screen grabs, and couldn't find any poses angled more than slightly past 90 degrees. No wait, actually on guy had his arms stretch out completely horizonatally. That counts right?

I really like how he struggles slips around before he makes it onto the bike ( I think there's a special name for that kind of bike ).<<

I like the whole slip and struggle to get on the bike too.

Yes, the bike is called a penny-farthing (also known as an ordinary bicycle). There is a nice write up about them in Wikipedia. A bicycle with two same size wheels, like we have today was called a safety bicycle. I saw a race a few years back where they were riding penny-fathings. It was awesome to watch.

As far as that clip, there seems to be hardly any frames without a clear silhouette or line of action. Beautiful example of what could be.